Vance Hartke Quotes

The causal chain of the deterioration (of the environment) is easily followed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide---all can be traced easily to too many people.

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent.

There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.

It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.

Our globe is under new dramatic environmental pressure: our globe is warming, our ice caps melting, our glaciers receding, our coral is dying, our soils are eroding, our water tables falling, our fisheries are being depleted, our remaining rainforests shrinking. Something is very, very wrong with our eco-system.

The bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century

Industries who profit by the rape of our environment see to it that legislators friendly to their attitudes are elected, and that bureaucrats of similar attitude are appointed.

We've raped our homelands to maintain our economies.

Environmental degradation and pollution constrain economic growth, contribute to large-scale migration, harm public health, and engender social unrest.

The plundering for profit of the world's natural resources has threatened the very sustainability of the planet.

Oil drilling and coal mining are killing endangered wildlife, polluting rivers, creating smog over wilderness areas and blocking wildlife corridors in America's most treasured landscapes.

Many of the environmental rules not only fail to protect the natural environment, they actually increase the damage.

Man, especially in our time, has without hesitation devastated wooded plains and valleys, polluted waters, disfigured the earth's habitat, made the air unbreathable, disturbed the hydro-geological and atmospheric systems, turned luxuriant areas into deserts and undertaken forms of unrestrained industrialization, degrading that 'flower bed'-which is the earth, our dwelling place.

Business is destroying the world, with flair, expertise, and panache.

The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.

You know, the environment is fragmenting, and the environment is, in many places, absolutely hideous!

Information from destructive activities going back a hundred years right up until today is being incorporated into the system. And as that happens the underlying framework of industrialism is collapsing and causing disintegration.

It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it.

The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production - in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation - essential as they are, make people sick and die.

Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.

I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt.

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.

We have serious challenges regarding climate change, unsustainable use of natural resources, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, forests and farmland. Not to mention the huge inequality still prevailing in several parts of the planet.

China is bearing the environmental cost for much of the world because China is the factory of the world.

Agriculture is the most destructive industry that we have. More than coal mining and other extractive industries.